Not Again, Not Completely
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: A Milliways New Moon Month & Half AU. Normal ships, plus Edward/Carlisle.


**Summary: **A possible Milliways New Moon Month & Half AU.

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******Not Again, Not Completely **  


**I.** Edward should have known by the fact he hadn't exactly been avoiding Carlisle yet, that Carlisle would be the first person to walk into Milliways the first time he had since leaving

Forks.

They didn't talk much at first, but then of the Cullen's, and of those who knew Edward best, they'd never needed to. And Edward was well aware from the first glance of annoyed relief merging into frustrated concern, that convincing Carlisle to leave anytime soon wasn't going to happen.

He stayed. They sat. Then Carlisle started about their new home and the state of their family. Each word hiding another thought-question of how he was, where he was, whether he was alright, listing his actions and reactions and lack of them like symptoms on a chart.

Edward's gaze stayed grimly straight, black` rimmed-amber eyes unblinking, as he listened. Without listening, without not listening. To all of it. Doing his best not to shift the number of times she came up in Carlisle's thoughts, in specificism or negative space.

He expected Carlisle to beg him to come home.

Even if beg equaled one sentence. Out loud.

He hadn't expected Carlisle to decree that if Edward wouldn't come home he would follow him back, and Edward hadn't the will to – or drive, inside the exhausted endless state of tireless perfection that only existed to mock the twisted world his had become – to stop him.

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**II.** The first time, and it pains Carlisle to think about it in that term, even now, even together, was different. Even when Edward had been livid and bitter there had been a passionate fire behind it. Angry and careless and flashing dangerously even in the smallest glance. In the tiny ramshackle disgrace there is only stillness.

Edward doesn't move. He doesn't walk. He doesn't talk. He sits, only occasionally stirring, responding only barely more in person than he ever did his phone, and stares. Reminding Carlisle of Marcus at his worst, of those beaten in servitude to Aro, of the worst parts of himself he never wanted to see displayed in Edward.

He has to shake the feeling daily that even if Edward isn't dying, everything that he was is dwindling away before his eyes, in a wound he isn't allowed to see or touch, no less has figured out how to make any better now than he did the first day he followed to South America.

But he refuses to let Edward out of his sight, knowing too well that if he's gone for the better part of hours, for anything, Edward won't be there when he returns.

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**III.** It was the fourth time Edward had passed on Carlisle's offer of hunting in a week, his eyes grown jet black even though he never allowed himself so much as to tremble. It is a burn far less than the one which used to consume him in her presence. It is a burn far less than the destruction of his world, ever burning, with the brown eyed and laughing, perfectly remember specter, which whispered to him.

There's pleading and swearing somewhere. From Carlisle. Everything that isn't Rio, is noise being made by Carlisle. An endless static that doesn't stop, attacks the endless listlessness and inability, the lack of reason and rhyme left, beyond guilt for Carlisle's wants which he knows cannot be sated and the distance between them and those waiting on him to return.

But he simply sat there, a glorious statue of inhuman beauty cursed into self imposed darkness for her glory. It's in the lull of this acceptable bargain of emptiness that Carlisle's thought, about threatening to dissect her if she hurt him, not being good enough even, fell into.

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**IV.** The hiss that exploded from Edward was the first sound and movement he'd made under Carlisle's watchful gaze in two days. Relief compounded with anger and terror threw his response back at Edward's hiss unremorseful when even this brought a shift to Edward. The narrowing of dangerously feral black eyes that had been empty of even consciousness until that moment.

He wouldn't regret that comment. He'd been right. He was still right. In this room, watching Edward waste away without her and for her, even though she was completely removed, whether moving on or not. She wasn't his concern. And he wouldn't regret having been right about what would, could, did, was still happening to Edward since it ended.

He didn't care that it wasn't her fault.

It was still all her fault. For existing.

For not understanding. For not seeing this.

And it only pissed him off when Edward growled and looked away defiantly. Rejecting him there. Trying and right. Again. He couldn't remember crossing the room or grabbing Edward's shirt, dragging him up into midair above his chair, speaking booming words that were lost on those nearly vacant again eyes.

Carlisle'd lost Edward before. To his own choices, to his own life's direction, the family members who had joined them, the passing decades of Edward being alone, watching him love again; little pieces falling off the table through time that even while Carlisle celebrated them, he knew he could never regain - that had once only and ever been his.

But he would not lose Edward to this.

Not again, not completely.

Carlisle didn't even care about repercussions when he kissed Edward, the man acting so much like the barren statue of a boy he looked, like an attack, suddenly demanding something from him. Real. Basic. Instinctual. Anything. Willing all the bridges of logic and sanity and right to burn if Edward would stop leaving. Expecting, terrified, it would all equal nothing. Even now.

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**V.** The chair didn't survive the reaction.

Or the table. Or a portion of one of the walls.

It wasn't a thing of glory. Any of the times it happened.

It was wild and desperate. It never allowed for grief or gentleness.

Still sometimes, sometimes, he felt like he could almost see Carlisle looking at him.

They didn't talk about the hunt he'd given up his first month here, or Carlisle's abandoned night classes. Or her. Edward made an effort not to flinch when Carlisle would think of her name or her face, but the only words he used once or twice was that he couldn't. He'd been selfish enough in what he'd had then already.

Carlisle didn't give up trying to convince him to come home.

But there was nothing left to come home with inside him.

There was a void, not a life, and they deserved better.

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**VI. ** Edward didn't talk much, but he'd talked more. Even if he still refused to answer his phone, Carlisle updated Ithica for the both of them while Edward would stand at the windows and watch the milling people. Sometimes daily, sometimes more often than daily depending on the callers and locations checking in.

They got used to the fact Carlisle would sometimes answer Edward's phone and grew to assume that Edward was within hearing distance even though he wouldn't respond to them, and only Carlisle would catch the subtle shifts in his expression. Guilt. Confusion. Exhaustion. Blankness.

Carlisle tried to keep the calls short the more despondent Edward after them, at least as much as he could without not talking to them himself. It was a thing he wouldn't do. He was the tenuous line between Edward's burgeoning sanity and bringing him home to all of them, slowly step by step.

Carlisle was right all along, of course. But it took two and half more weeks before he knew how much.

Weeks where Edward actually had conversations lasting more than five or ten minutes a few times, about random things. Because it was easier to discuss random minutia or old passing memories than anything else that circumnavigated around them and the ramshackle house.

The first time Edward had encouraged him to hunt alone rather than go hungry Carlisle had run both ways and barely eaten. But it had been impossible to miss the mixture of relief and grief on Edward's face when he looked at Carlisle in the doorway from where he was standing at the window again.

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**VII.** Edward had looked away, but said only that Carlisle hadn't had to hurry.

Nothing had been moved, and Edward hadn't much either. The second time had started the same as the first. And the third. And the fourth. Weeks. Their world a place of silent stillness broken in random bouts for minutes of dialog, or invasion by the other worlds that reached for them still, before it was subsumed again into the void.

A tiny ship bobbing on the very edge of the world, tottering.

But only one of them belonged here, and only one of them was hopeful.

It's almost too easy the fifth time. Every moment was already excruciating. The end of the light, of life as he has known it and almost allowed himself to dream of being allowed to survive in, fits into only ten words this time, left written on the broken table itself in an empty house:

_I can't be this selfish, either._

_They need you more._


End file.
